EXPERIENCES WITH SELECTING SEARCH ENGINES USING METASEARCH

Search engines are among the most useful and high-profile resources on the Internet. The problem of finding information on the Internet has been replaced with the problem of knowing where search engines are, wh at they are designed to retrieve, and how to use them. This article de scribes and evaluates SavvySearch, a metasearch engine designed to int elligently select and interface with multiple remote search engines. T he primary metasearch issue examined is the importance of carefully se lecting and ranking remote search engines for user queries; We studied the efficacy of SavvySearch's incrementally acquired metaindex approa ch to selecting search engines by analyzing the effect of time and exp erience on performance. We also compared the metaindex approach to the simpler categorical approach and showed how much experience is requir ed to surpass the simple scheme.